Sensitive people are under-appreciated in our society (at best). The beauty they see in life and humanity inspires us with hope for meaning, and it compels us to protect what’s valuable. But their sensitivity makes them much more aware of how things we take for granted in our laws and customs can be damaging to people, and that awareness frequently sets those sensitive people at odds with the society around them.

People tend to ignore things they find painful. This sets up filters in their brains that rejects such information before it even reaches their conscious mind. But realize what this means: such people have deliberately made themselves unable to see reality for what it is. Sensitive people, who feel pain too strongly to ignore it, can’t do this, and consequently have an automatically better understanding of what is really going on.

When someone opposes you, your inclination is always to fight back, instead of understanding why the person is opposing you. If that person is a sensitive person, however, your fighting back is going to overwhelm them and make it hard for them to explain why they’re opposing you. In your mind, they’ve become angry belligerents, and their sensitivity to beauty is lost to you. That makes it easy to write off their concerns, which results in an unfortunate loss of necessary feedback — much like cutting out your eye because you don’t like what you see.

There are some people who are belligerent because they want to take power. But others do it because they want to make things better and minimize people getting hurt. Opposing the latter group results in a harsher society for everyone.

Remember this: to his society, Jesus was a belligerent. But his desire was to help people. That doesn’t mean every sensitive person is Jesus. But failing to take sensitive people seriously contributes to the destruction of people and increased suffering in society.